Orthodoxy by Gilbert K. Chesterton

I--Introduction in Defence of Everything Else

THE only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge.
Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. When some time ago I
published a series of hasty but sincere papers, under the name of "Heretics,"
several critics for whose intellect I have a warm respect (I may mention
specially Mr. G. S. Street) said that it was all very well for me to tell
everybody to affirm his cosmic theory, but that I had carefully avoided
supporting my precepts with example. "I will begin to worry about my
philosophy," said Mr. Street, "when Mr. Chesterton has given us his." It was
perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write
books upon the feeblest provocation. But after all, though Mr. Street has
inspired and created this book, he need not read it. If he does read it, he
will find that in its pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a
set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the
philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy;
for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who
slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression
that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am
either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it
away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a
general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by
signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be
the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny
that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate
that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not
studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this
tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was
the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same
few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the
humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the
fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing
there? What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New
South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really
old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers,
and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at
once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic
town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how
can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the
comfort and honour of being our own town?

To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too
big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to
follow one path of argument; and this is the path that I here propose to
follow. I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double
spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar
which Christendom has rightly named romance. For the very word "romance" has in
it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dispute
anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond
stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not
propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to
take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this
desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a
poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have
desired. If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank
existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary
people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.
But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live
would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical
romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is
secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an
idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being
merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall
chiefly pursue in these pages.

But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered
England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England. I do not see how
this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the
truth) how it can avoid being dull. Dulness will, however, free me from the
charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant. Mere light sophistry
is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a
wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know
nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the
indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived
upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his
mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as
lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly
hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the
truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life
said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had
ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it.
It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature
who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does
exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. One
searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more
extraordinary truths. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to
all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all
I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.

For if this book is a joke it is a joke against me. I am the man who with the
utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. If there is an
element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book
explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I
was the last. It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.
No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can
accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story,
and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne. I freely confess all the idiotic
ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn
little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten
minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years
behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in
uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I
have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but
simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be,
Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in
inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of
civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find
England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy
of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was
orthodoxy.

It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy
fiasco. It might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I gradually learnt from
the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant
philosophy, things that I might have learnt from my catechism -- if I had ever
learnt it. There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I found at
last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the
nearest parish church. If any one is entertained by learning how the flowers of
the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains
of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of
Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book. But there is in everything
a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth
would induce me to read it.

I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the
beginning of the book. These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual
fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the
Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics. They are not
intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what
is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed. When the
word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by
everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general
historic conduct of those who held such a creed. I have been forced by mere
space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the
matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it.
This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography.
But if any one wants my opinions about the actual nature of the authority, Mr.
G. S. Street has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him
another book.